Today, it's about which one of them will be relegated. Wexford might have anticipated being in such a predicament.

Armagh couldn't have. It is why, for all the hype surrounding events in Castlebar and Dublin, Wexford Park hosts the game of the day.

Tyrone and Kerry merely want to win. Armagh have to.

Even if they do, we cannot say for sure that they'll be All Ireland contenders again.

What we can say is that if they lose, they will not be contenders. Last month Kieran McGeeney rightly claimed that "if we got relegated but won the championship, you wouldn't even hear about it next year", but that's one mighty big "if". No All Ireland champion of the past 10 years has failed to make the league play-offs.

Though Armagh are the team with the maturity to most likely buck that trend, even their self-confidence wouldn't be able to sustain the humiliation of relegation and a fourth straight loss to a Leinster team. You could say today is a KitKat Moment . . . it will tell us whether Armagh are dead or whether they've just been taking a break.

Right now we're undecided. Some context is important. While Armagh lost just one of their nine games en route to last year's league title, their performances in the round-robin stage were only marginally better than this year's. This year they lost to Kildare by two points;

they beat the same side by only a point last year. They needed three goals to see off Laois last year; their problem this year was they could only manage two. Once again this spring they hammered Galway by 10 points, once again they saw off Down.

True, last year they had to do without the Crossmaglen contingent for a good deal of their earlier games. But this year when they lost to Kildare and Meath, they were also seriously depleted, starting both games with only four of the 15 that started last year's All Ireland semi-final.

The real difference is that instead of playing two teams on the wane in Sligo and Limerick, this year they've played two on the up in Derry and Meath. Truth is, Armagh only began to click last year in April. This year might be no different.

It's the way they've been losing, though. For seven years, Armagh have had the most watertight defence in football. This spring, only Meath, Carlow and London have conceded more points.

It would be misleading to put that down to the absence of Francie Bellew this past three games; Francie was there when Meath took them for 19 points and when Galway got in for two goals. Individually Brian Mallon, Enda McNulty and Ciaran McKeever have also been out-ofsorts. Collectively, though, Armagh have really struggled defensively.

Joe Kernan believes it's because that defensive unit has been over-worked and over-stretched. In Armagh's last game before Kernan took over as team manager, they put on an exhibition of ball retention against Westmeath that Ger Heavin says was a turning point for his county in that breakthrough year it had in 2001; "We learned that day, " he said, "if you give the ball away against a team like an Armagh, you don't get it back."

This year, you do.

"We're making too many mistakes with the ball, " admits Kernan. "Instead of going down and creating a score, we're suddenly defending and scores are coming from it. It might be leaving off a simple pass, it may be not needing to take that extra solo and staying out of trouble." He maintains though, it is "nothing that can't be fixed". The inches his team need are still everywhere around them; eventually they'll stop being that halfsecond too late or too early with their runs and passes.

Certainly it's hard to see some of the turnovers being committed today or during the summer. McGeeney spoiled an otherwise fine performance against Laois a fortnight ago with some dreadful foot-passing but he remains possibly the best foot-passing half-back in football and the best foot-passer in the Armagh panel. It is why, given Philip Loughran's indifferent form this spring, you should not be surprised if McGeeney lines out both today and during the summer where he is named to start in Wexford . . . at midfield. When he played there for the opening quarter in the McKenna Cup semi-final against Tyrone, he was probably the best player on the pitch, until the threat of Stephen O'Neill forced him to sweep in between his fullback and half-back lines.

That's the dilemma Armagh have. They need McGeeney protecting the full-back line and they need someone in midfield to supply Steven McDonnell and Oisin McConville with the ball.

At the moment that's not happening on a consistent basis. No team in the country has scored as many goals (10) this spring but that's their very problem; they've been over-reliant on finding the net to stay in games. Only once in six games have they managed to kick more than nine points; only Wexford themselves have scored fewer points in Division 1B.

John McEntee has been chipping in with a point per game but both he and his brother are struggling with their form and the pace of play. Stephen Kernan will come good some year but maybe not this one;

his form has been patchy to date. So, even, has McDonnell's; while he continues to score at least a goal every second game, he is averaging less than a point from play per game. There have been spells this spring when McConville looked livelier playing inside than he did all last year on the wing; with him and Ronan Clarke due back against Monaghan in the first round, Armagh, on paper, have one of the best three full-forward lines in the country. After so many years and games on the clock though, it's asking a lot of McDonnell, McConville and Clarke to all recapture the fitness and form of '02 or even of '05.

And ultimately, that's what it comes down to. There is no reason to doubt Kernan's assertion that the commitment of the players has been again exemplary this year, that the side's veterans "take very good care of themselves", that it's not as if they're playing 40 games in a year but rather about peaking six or seven times during the summer. They might not even need to do that; beat Monaghan and either Fermanagh or Antrim and they're in another Ulster final and in the last 12 of the All Ireland series. But they'll enter that first-round game against Monaghan without that customary Armagh aura, an aura which has won them battles before they were even fought. Maybe training only once a week collectively for the first six weeks of the year has attributed to their lack of sharpness on and off the ball, and maybe being relieved of the captaincy and the onus of always having to say the right thing at the right time might help McGeeney's own game.

Or maybe all those turnovers are the inevitable signs of slippage that comes from all those battles, all that effort and years of taking good care of themselves.

If the idea of Armagh being relegated might have seemed unfathomable to you a month ago, then picture this: if Wexford, Donegal and Monaghan all win today, there will be seven Ulster teams playing Division One football next year. The two who won't will be Antrim and Armagh.

Imagine that. A team that have, for six of the past seven years, been one of the country's 'Big Three' might, next spring, not even be one of Ulster's top seven.

As Andy Dufresne used to tell his old friend Red in Shawshank, it's time "to get busy living or get busy dying".

Starting today.